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Active location monitoring in Scense 10

When working on a mobile device, like a laptop, or when disconnecting from a VDI workstation only to continue working on it elsewhere, you might see that Scense will not automatically adjust the workspace to match the new location.

Scense 10 has this undocumented unsupported experimental feature that might help you out. Setting some registry keys will make the Scense Client monitor for location changes and when a location change has been detected it will re-assess the current location and re-launch the logon script.

The location monitoring feature must be switched on per workstation using a Local Machine registry key:
HKLM\Software\Scense – RecycleOnIPChange (REG_DWORD) = 1

When this value has been set Scense Client will start monitoring any changes in the IP-address of the access device about 1 minute after completing the initial logon script. Additionally you can change the way Scense Client will check for location changes by settings this additional registry value:
HKLM\Software\Scense – AltIPCheckVar (REG_SZ) (If this value is not set Scense Client will evaluate the %WTSClientIP% variable.)
You can set this value to any Scense variable, including function variables, to provide alternative ways of monitoring the location.

One might not like the fact that the entire logon script is being repeated within the same session, but a new variable %LocationChanged% will make things manageable. The %LocationChanged% variable will resolve to True after a location change has been detected. This value will only be True during the execution of the logon script after such a location change. The variable will be reset to False right after the logon script has finished. This means that certain tasks can be skipped based on this variable when the logon script is re-launched after a location change, preventing these tasks from running more than once per session.

Here’s a demo scenario.

First we switch on the feature.

We leave the default behavior for monitoring the access device IP, so we’re not setting the AltIPCheckVar value.

Next we create a new Taskset to make the behavior more visible.

The Scope for this Taskset looks like this:

To see if this will work we first have to logon to the workstation where this feature has been switched on, let the logon script complete and wait at least a minute before the next step. During the initial logon script we will not see the message box.

After a minute and a half we connect to the workstation over RDP (Remote Desktop) and we expect the Scense Client to notice the access device change and trigger the re-launch of the logon script.

Within 30 seconds after switching access devices the change is noticed and the logon script is launched. The %LocationChanged% variable is temporarily set to True and the message-box shows.